Mind||Self vis-à-vis Identity and Unity are looked at in the following excerpt from David Bentley Hart’s “Emergence & Formation” with respect to Reductive and Non-Reductive vectors.
Begin Quote:
An emergent reality is one that, though
remaining ever dependent upon the native properties of the elements composing
it, nevertheless possesses new characteristics that are wholly “irreducible” to
those properties. But this is certainly false. At least, as a claim made solely
about physical processes, organisms, and structures — in purely material terms
— it cannot possibly be true. If nothing else, it is a claim strictly precluded
by most modern scientific prejudice. From a genuinely “physicalist”
perspective, there are no such things as emergent properties in this sense,
discontinuous from the properties of the prior causes from which they arise;
anything, in principle, must be reducible, by a series of “geometrical” steps,
to the physical attributes of its ingredients.
Those who think otherwise are, in most
cases, merely confusing irreducibility with identity. Smith, for instance, uses
the example of water, which, though composed of the two very combustible
elements hydrogen and oxygen, possesses the novel property of extinguishing fire;
therefore, says Smith, water “is irreducible to that of which it is composed.”
But it is nothing of the sort. Yes, water’s resistance to combustion is not
identical with any property resident in either hydrogen or oxygen molecules,
but it is most definitely reducible to those special molecular properties that,
in a particular combination, cause hydrogen and oxygen to negate one another’s
combustible propensities.
A seemingly more promising example
adduced by Smith is that of a computer, which (he notes) is composed of
silicon, metal, plastic, electrical impulses, and so on, but which possesses
functions that are not present in any of its parts and that are qualitatively
different from a mere aggregation of the properties of its parts in some sort
of total sum.
Here, however, Smith compounds his
earlier error by failing to notice that what distinguishes a computer’s powers
from those individually possessed by its various elements is not any emergent
property at all, but rather the causal influence of a creative intellect acting
upon those elements from without. Taken as a purely physical phenomenon,
nothing that a computer does — as distinct, that is, from what an intending
mind does with a computer — is anything more than the mathematically
predictable result of all its physical antecedents. At the purely material
level, whatever is emergent is also reducible to that from which it emerges;
otherwise, “emergence” is merely the name of some kind of magical transition
between intrinsically disparate realities.
In any event, I have no great quarrel
with Smith. In the end, he is quite correct that a computer is not reducible
without remainder to its physical components. He is even more correct in
arguing — as is the purpose of his book — that human personality is not
reducible to purely physical forces and events. The problem with his argument
is merely a matter of the conceptual model of causation that he has adopted.
For, in the end, what reductionism fails to account for, and in fact fails even
to see, is not the principle of emergence, but the reality of formal causality.
In the case of the computer, for instance, its functions are more than the sum
of the properties inherent in its physical constituents because a further,
adventitiously informing causality, itself directed by a final causality, has
assumed those physical constituents into a purposive structure that in no
meaningful sense can be said to have emerged from them. (The captious
physicalist, of course, would want at this point to assert that the mind and
actions of the computer’s designer are themselves only physical events, and so
the computer is still emergent from and reducible to a larger ensemble of
material causes; but that is both beside the point and, as it happens, entirely
wrong.)
Why is this distinction particularly
important? Principally because it seems quite clear to me that there are
realities in nature that are indeed irreducible to their physical basis, and
that this fact renders materialism — or physicalism, or naturalism — wholly incredible.
Existence itself, for what it is worth, is the prime example of an indubitable
truth about the world that is irreducible to physical causes (since any
physical causes there might be must already exist). But consciousness is
perhaps an example more easily grasped. And, just to refresh our memories, we
should recall how many logical difficulties a materialist reduction of mind
entails.
The most commonly invoked is the
problem of qualia, of that qualitative sense of “what it is like” that
constitutes the immediate intuitive form of subjectivity, and that poses
philosophical difficulties that even the tireless and tortuous bluster of a
Daniel Dennett cannot entirely obscure. There is also the difficulty of
abstract concepts, which become more dazzlingly difficult to explain the more
deeply one considers how entirely they determine our conscious engagement with
the world. And of course, there is the problem of reason: for to reason about
something is to proceed from one premise or proposition or concept to another,
in order ideally to arrive at some conclusion, and in a coherent sequence whose
connections are determined by the semantic content of each of the steps taken;
but, if nature is mere physical mechanism, all sequences of cause and effect
must be determined entirely by the impersonal laws governing the material
world. One neuronal event can cause another as a result of physical necessity,
but certainly not as a result of logical necessity; and the connections
among the brain’s neurons cannot generate the symbolic and conceptual
connections that compose an act of consecutive logic, because the brain’s
neurons are connected organically and interact physically, not conceptually.
And then there is the transcendental
unity of consciousness, which makes such intentional uses of reason possible
and which poses far greater difficulties for the materialist than any mere
neurological “binding problem.” Then, of course, there is perhaps the greatest
difficulty of all, intentionality, what the great Franz Brentano regarded as
the supreme “mark of the mental,” inseparable from every act of consciousness:
the mind’s directedness, its “aboutness,” its capacity for meaning, by which it
thinks, desires, believes, represents, wills, imagines, or otherwise orients itself
toward a specific object, purpose, or end.
On the one hand, the mind knows
nothing in a merely passive way, but always has an end or meaning toward which
it is purposively directed, as toward a final cause; yet, on the other, there
is absolutely no intentional reciprocity between the mind and the objects of
its intentions (that is, thoughts can be directed toward things, but things, at
least taken as purely material events, cannot be directed toward thoughts).
Intentionality is finite and concerned with its objects under specific aspects,
whereas material reality is merely an infinite catenation of accidental events;
and so the specific content of the mind’s intentions must be determined by
consciousness alone. One could never derive the specific meaning of a given
physical event from the event itself, not even a brain event, because in itself
it means nothing at all; even the most minute investigation of its physical
constituents and instances could never yield the particular significance that
the mind represents it as having. And so on.
Not that there is room here to argue
these points. Nonetheless, there are very good reasons why the most consistent
materialist philosophers of mind — when, that is, they are not attempting to
get around these difficulties with nonsolutions like “epiphenomenalism” or
incoherently fantastic solutions like “panpsychism” — have no choice in the end
but to deny that such things as qualia or intentionality or even consciousness
as such truly exist at all. The heroic absurdism that, in differing registers,
constitutes the blazingly incandescent core of the thought of Daniel Dennett,
Alex Rosenberg, Paul and Patricia Churchland, and other impeccable materialists
of the same general kind follows from the recognition — not very philosophically
sophisticated as a rule, but astute nonetheless — that consciousness can exist
within the world of nature only if matter is susceptible of formation by a
higher causality, one traditionally called “soul.” And the soul, as such a
formal cause, is precisely that which cannot simply “emerge.”
End Quote.
Overlapping Segues:
https://metachristianity.blogspot.com/2020/01/most-egregious-of-naturalisms-deficiencies.html
https://metachristianity.blogspot.com/2020/01/reason-itself-the-parasite-upon-irrational.html
https://metachristianity.blogspot.com/2020/01/intentionality-mental-states-searle.html
https://metachristianity.blogspot.com/2020/01/consciousness-and-emergence-and-formation.html
